Culture and First-Person Pronouns

Abstract

Priming research has shown that repeated exposures to first-person singular pronouns (I, my, me, mine) activate an individualistic orientation, whereas first-person plural pronouns (we, our, us, ours) activate a collectivistic orientation. However, little research has been done to explore the opposite direction of influence such that one's cultural orientation determines one's choice between first-person singular versus plural pronouns. The authors conducted three studies to examine the effects of one's cultural orientation on one's use of first-person possessive pronouns. Results show that, compared to their individualistic counterparts, participants who have a collectivistic orientation, chronically or temporarily by priming, preferred to use first-person plural possessive pronouns.

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PSPB, Vol. 1 No. 1, February 2007 1492-XXX
DOI:
© 2007 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.
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Culture and First-Person Pronouns
Jinkyung Na
University of Michigan
Incheol Choi
Seoul National University
So far, the empirical demonstrations of a link between
cultural self-views and first-person pronouns have been
one-directional. Namely, researchers have exposed partici-
pants to a certain class of first-person pronouns and then
observed the effect on self-views and reasoning style. If the
relationship between one’s cultural orientation and first-
person pronouns is robust, then we should be able to
observe the opposite direction of influence as well. For
example, it could be demonstrated that priming one’s cul-
tural orientation affects one’s use of first-person pronouns.
Such a demonstration will deepen our understanding about
how culture and pronouns are deeply intertwined.
Linguistic Constraint in Use of First-Person
Pronouns: English Versus Korean
There appears to exist a good reason why researchers
have not tried to demonstrate the influence of cultural
orientation on the use of first-person pronouns: gram-
mar. For example, in English one must use my, not our,
when referring to one’s wife or husband. To native
English speakers, choosing between my and our in such
a case is not a matter of one’s self-view; rather, it is a mat-
ter of one’s English competence. The same is also true for
most languages in which the pronoun-priming technique
Authors’ Note: We thank Richard Nisbett and the members of Social
Psychology Lab at Seoul National University for their helpful com-
ments on earlier versions of this article. The writing of this article was
supported by the Cognitive Neuroscience Program of the Korea
Ministry of Science and Technology (M10644402003-06N4402-
00310). Correspondence should be addressed to either Jinkyung Na,
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 3232 East Hall,
530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 e-mail: jinna@umich.edu,
or Incheol Choi, Department of Psychology, Seoul National University,
San 56-1, Sillim-Dong, Gwanank-Gu, Seoul 151-742, Korea, e-mail:
ichoi@snu.ac.kr.
PSPB, Vol. 35 No. 11, November 2009 1492-1499
DOI: 10.1177/0146167209343810
© 2009 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.
Priming research has shown that repeated exposures to
first-person singular pronouns (I, my, me, mine) activate
an individualistic orientation, whereas first-person plu-
ral pronouns (we, our, us, ours) activate a collectivistic
orientation. However, little research has been done to
explore the opposite direction of influence such that
one’s cultural orientation determines one’s choice between
first-person singular versus plural pronouns. The authors
conducted three studies to examine the effects of one’s
cultural orientation on one’s use of first-person possessive
pronouns. Results show that, compared to their individu-
alistic counterparts, participants who have a collectivistic
orientation, chronically or temporarily by priming, pre-
ferred to use first-person plural possessive pronouns.
Keywords: cultural differences; self-concept; priming; lan-
guage; pronouns
Recent priming studies have repeatedly demonstrated
that exposure to first-person singular pronouns
(I, my, me, mine) induces an individual to adopt an indi-
vidualistic self-view, whereas exposure to first-person plural
pronouns (we, our, us, ours) leads an individual to adopt a
collectivistic self-view, albeit temporarily (Brewer &
Gardner, 1996; Gardner, Gabriel, & Lee, 1999; Kühnen &
Haberstroh, 2004). Such a primed self-view, in turn, affects
one’s values, behavior, and even general thinking style (for
a comprehensive review, see Oyserman & Lee, 2008). For
example, a primed individualistic self-view activates an
analytic way of thinking, and a primed collectivistic self-
view activates a holistic way of thinking, creating perform-
ance differences in tasks such as the Embedded Figures Test
(Hannover & Kühnen, 2005; Kühnen, Hannover, &
Schubert, 2001). It is remarkable that the pronoun-priming
technique works not only in English (Gardner et al., 1999)
but also in German (Kühnen et al., 2001), in Dutch (van
Baaren, Maddux, Chartrand, de Bouter, & van Knippenberg,
2003), and in Korean (Cha, 2006).
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Na, Choi / CULTURE AND PRONOUNS 1493
proved to be successful in activating a particular self-view
(e.g., German and Dutch). Very fortunately, however,
Korean is an exception.
In Korean, there are two first-person possessive pro-
nouns: nae and wuri. Nae is a first-person singular
possessive, equivalent to my in English, whereas wuri
is a first-person plural possessive, equivalent to our in
English. Very interestingly, however, Korean grammar
allows both nae and wuri in the places in which
English only allows my. Although wuri indicates that
something belongs or relates both to oneself and to
one or more other people (just as our does), wuri is
also used inplace of nae to show one’s intimacy to
something or someone (usually one who is not higher
in social status; see the National Institute of the Korean
Language, www.korean.go.kr/08_new/index.jsp).
Hence, Koreans can say either nae wife or wuri wife
without conveying the impression that the speaker is
either incompetent in Korean or unconventional in
marriage. Thus, the Korean language provides an ideal
setting in which we can examine whether one’s cultural
orientation determines one’s preference for the first-
person possessive pronoun. Specifically, we examined
whether Korean collectivists, chronic or primed, would
prefer wuri, and whether Korean individualists, chronic
or primed, would prefer nae as the first-person singu-
lar pronoun.
Psychological Closeness, Self, and Wuri
Our basic assumption is that one’s choice of first-
person pronouns (possessive, in the present research)
reveals one’s self-view. A fundamental difference in self-
view between collectivists and individualists is the extent
to which others are included into one’s self-concept.
According to Markus and Kitayama (1991), the interde-
pendent self-view typically possessed by collectivists
includes others as a significant component, whereas the
independent self-view possessed by individualists does
not. An individual views himself or herself as independ-
ent of and unique from others in the independent self-
view but as interdependent with and connected to
significant others in the interdependent self-view (Fiske,
Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998; Heine, Lehman,
Markus, & Kitayama, 1999; Markus & Kitayama,
1991). Therefore, those with an interdependent self-view
would like to experience and signal psychological close-
ness between their significant others and themselves.
Such signaling of closeness can be achieved by various
ways, such as claiming more commonality (Kitayama,
Markus, Tummala, Kurokawa, & Kato, 1990) and less
uniqueness and superiority (Heine et al., 1999; H. S. Kim
& Markus, 1999) and by favoring ingroup members
(Triandis, Bontempo, Villareal, & Asai, 1988). In addi-
tion to these methods, we argue that the use of wuri is
another (probably simpler) way that Korean collectivists
can signal their psychological closeness to others. By
referring to one’s brother as wuri brother rather than nae
brother, one can effectively communicate one’s closeness
to his or her brother to the audience, which potentially
includes the reference person (brother). In addition, one
may intentionally use wuri to invite the reference person
to a closer relationship. For example, after a fist fight,
one may refer to his brother as wuri brother in public as
a gesture of reconciliation. In fact, in his analysis of wuri,
J. N. Kim (2003) argued that wuri signals intimacy when
it is used as a first-person possessive pronoun.
Our argument is basically in line with past research
on language and interpersonal relationship among
English speakers. For example, partners who are highly
committed to their relationships and close to their
partners used a greater number of the plural pronoun
(we; Agnew, Van Lange, Rusbult, & Langston, 1998).
Furthermore, Fitzsimons and Kay (2004) demonstrated
that the use of we could produce greater interpersonal
intimacy. In addition, Pennebaker and his colleagues
found that people expressed a greater sense of commu-
nity by using we more frequently and dropping I as a
reaction to shared grief (Stone & Pennebaker, 2002) or
crisis (Cohn, Mehl, & Pennebaker, 2004). For example,
Mehl and Pennebaker (2003) found that the use of the
first-person plural increased and that of first-person
singular decreased following September 11 in natural
conversations among college students.
STUDY 1
Study 1 was conducted to test our hypothesis at the
individual-difference level by examining whether Korean
collectivists would prefer to use wuri (our) and whether
Korean individualists would prefer to use nae (my) as
the first-person singular possessive pronoun. Participants
were asked to translate a short essay written in English
into Korean. The essay described a family of four mem-
bers (father, mother, older brother, and younger brother),
and the essay writer (younger brother) consistently used
my in the essay when referring to his family (“my fam-
ily”) and family members (e.g., “my brother”). We
hypothesized that Korean collectivists would translate
my into wuri more frequently than Korean individual-
ists would.
The reason we asked participants to translate an
English essay about someone else’s family into Korean,
rather than to write about their own families in Korean,
was that the choice between nae and wuri might be
affected not only by one’s self-view but also by the
number of siblings when writing an essay about one’s
own family. Suppose that Participant A has two siblings
and Participant B has only one sibling. Then, Participant
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1494 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN
A would be more likely than Participant B to refer to his
or her brother as “wuri brother,” not necessarily because
Participant A is more collectivistic but because Participant
A and another sibling of his or hers may call the tar-
get brother “wuri brother” to represent co-sharing. In
other words, to Participant A, wuri brother can mean
a brother of his or her and another sibling. This con-
founding does not occur for Participant B. To avoid this
confounding between one’s cultural orientation and one’s
family size, we asked participants to translate into Korean
an English essay about someone else’s family in which
the number of siblings is held constant.
Method
Participants. One hundred Korean undergraduates
(54 males; 45 females; 1 unidentified) participated in
Study 1 in return for partial course credit.
Procedure. The cultural orientation of participants
was assessed in a large pretest session at the beginning of
the semester by a version of the INDCOL scale (Triandis,
1996).1 The INDCOL scale consists of 28 items, 14 of
which measure one’s collectivistic orientation (e.g., “My
happiness depends very much on the happiness of those
around me”), and 14 of which measure one’s individu-
alistic orientation (e.g., “I am a unique person, separate
from others”). Participants indicated the degree of their
agreement with each item on a 9-point scale ranging
from 1 (strongly disagree) to 9 (strongly agree). Each
participant’s INDCOL score was calculated by subtract-
ing the sum of responses for the individualism items
from the sum of responses for the collectivism items. A
high score reflects a collectivistic orientation, whereas a
low score suggests an individualistic orientation. We
also used the individualism score and the collectivism
score separately for data analysis.
Upon arrival at the laboratory, participants were told
that they would be translating a short English essay into
Korean. The cover story was that the experimenter was
investigating college students’ linguistic styles. The par-
ticipants were assured that their English skills were not
the focus of the study. The participants in the family essay
condition (n = 58) were provided with an English essay
in which a younger son introduced his family, which con-
sisted of his parents, his older brother, and himself. The
word my appeared 16 times in total throughout the essay,
including the title. Our hypothesis was that Korean col-
lectivists would use wuri as a translation of my more
frequently than Korean individualists would.
However, an alternative explanation requires our
careful consideration. One might argue that, for some
reasons, Korean collectivists are less fluent in English
and hence would be more confused with the distinction
between my and our than their individualist counter-
parts. This alternative view argues that collectivists mis-
takenly, not purposefully, use wuri as a translation of
my. To examine this alternative hypothesis, we added a
second condition where participants received an English
essay in which a target person described his room, not
his family. The essay in the room condition (n = 42) was
nearly the same length as the family essay. The word my
was also used 16 times in the room essay. In all 16 cases,
my was used to refer to the essay writer’s own belong-
ings, not shared by any other person (e.g., “my CDs”).
Therefore, if poorer English proficiency by collectivists
was the main reason, then they would use wuri as a
Korean translation of my more frequently than individu-
alists would, even in the room essay condition.
Results and Discussion
We calculated the proportion of wuri (PW) for each
participant—the number of uses of wuri as a translation
of my over the total number of translations of my.2
Then, we performed a 2 (cultural orientation: collectiv-
ists vs. individualists) × 2 (condition: family essay vs.
room essay) ANOVA on PW. For this analysis, partici-
pants were divided into collectivists and individualists
based on the median score of the INDCOL scale. We
hypothesized that PW would be greater for collectivistic
Koreans than for individualistic Koreans but only in the
family essay condition, hence an interaction between
cultural orientation and essay condition.
Consistent with our hypothesis, we found a signifi-
cant interaction effect between cultural orientation and
condition, F(1, 95) = 7.38, p < .01, η2
p = .072. Collectivistic
Koreans (M = 0.56, SD = 0.33) used wuri more fre-
quently than did their individualistic counterparts (M =
0.30, SD = 0.30) in the family essay condition, t(56) =
3.24, p < .01, Cohen’s d = .85. Importantly, PW was not
different between individualists and collectivists in the
room essay condition, t < 1. In fact, no participant used
wuri in the room essay condition (i.e., PW = 0 for all
participants). This result speaks against the alternative
view. If Korean collectivists were more confused between
my and our than Korean individualists because of their
poorer English skills, the former should have used wuri
more frequently than the latter as a Korean translation
of my, even in the room essay condition.
The above pattern was also obtained with regression
analysis. Instead of treating INDCOL score as a dichoto-
mous variable, we ran regression analysis using INDCOL
score as a continuous variable and obtained the same
pattern of results (pertinent βs shown in Table 1).3
We further examined whether the target word associ-
ated with my mattered. Because my was used in refer-
ence to family, parents, and brother in the family essay
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Na, Choi / CULTURE AND PRONOUNS 1495
condition, we ran a 3 (target: family vs. parents vs.
brother) × 2 (cultural orientation: collectivists vs. indi-
vidualists) ANOVA with the target as a within-subject
factor. It turned out that the Target × Cultural Orientation
effect was not significant, F(2, 70) = .25, p = ns, indicat-
ing that collectivistic Koreans used wuri more frequently
than individualistic Koreans did, regardless of the refer-
ence target (see Table 2 for more detailed analyses for
each target).
Taken together, Study 1 provides initial evidence sug-
gesting that one’s cultural orientation is associated with
one’s choice of first-person possessive pronouns among
Koreans. However, because Study 1 is correlational, it
was important to conduct an experiment to establish the
causality.
STUDY 2
To establish a causal relation, it is necessary to dem-
onstrate that a manipulation of one’s cultural orientation
affects one’s choice of first-person possessive pronouns,
such that those who receive an individualism priming
would translated my into wuri more frequently than
those who receive a collectivism priming. Study 2 was
conducted to achieve this goal. We manipulated partici-
pants’ cultural orientation by using the priming procedure
developed by Trafimow and his colleagues (Trafimow,
Silverman, Fan, & Law, 1997; Trafimow, Triandis, &
Goto, 1991).
Method
Participants. Forty-eight Korean undergraduates (20
males and 28 females) participated in Study 2 in return
for partial course credit. Twenty-five students were ran-
domly assigned to the individualism priming condition
and the remainder was assigned to the collectivism prim-
ing condition.
Procedure. Participants were told that they would take
part in two separate studies. They were informed that the
first study would survey how college students thought
about themselves in comparison with their significant
others and that the second study would investigate col-
lege students’ linguistic styles.
In the first phase, participants received either an
individualism or a collectivism priming manipulation.
Following Trafimow et al. (1991, Experiment 1), we
asked participants to “think of what makes you different
from your family and friends and write it down” (indi-
vidualism prime, I-prime) or to “think of what you have
in common with your family and friends and write it
down” (collectivism prime, C-prime). Then, in the second
TABLE 1: Standard Coefficients From Regression Predicting Proportion of Wuri (PW) as a Function of Cultural Orientations
PW for Family PW for Parent PW for Brother PW Overall
INDCOL scale .253* .350** .318* .337***
*p < .100. **p < .05. ***p < .01.
TABLE 2: Means and Standard Deviations of Proportion of Wuri (PW) in Studies 1 and 2
Study 1 Study 2
M SD prep Cohen’s d M SD prep Cohen’s d
Family .91 .59 Family .81 .47
Individualistic (29) 0.39** 0.35 Individualistic (25) 0.57 0.40
Collectivistic (29) 0.60** 0.35 Collectivistic (23) 0.74 0.31
Parent .97 .88 Parent .92 .72
Individualistic (24) 0.15*** 0.34 Individualistic (25) 0.48** 0.47
Collectivistic (25) 0.52*** 0.48 Collectivistic (23) 0.78** 0.33
Brother .90 .70 Brother .90 .75
Individualistic (19) 0.17** 0.37 Individualistic (20) 0.22** 0.43
Collectivistic (19) 0.46** 0.46 Collectivistic (22) 0.56** 0.48
All .98 .85 All .90 .63
Individualistic (29) 0.30*** 0.30 Individualistic (25) 0.50** 0.40
Collectivistic (29) 0.56*** 0.33 Collectivistic (23) 0.72** 0.29
NOTE: Independent t tests between individualists and collectivists were conducted for each of the target words. The number of participants is
provided in parentheses. The analysis included those who translated at least one case within each category, so the number of participants varies
across targets.
**p < .05. ***p < .01.
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1496 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN
phase, participants received the same family essay used
in Study 1 and were asked to translate it into Korean.
Results and Discussion
The PW was calculated in the same way as in Study 1.
Consistent with our hypothesis, C-prime participants
translated my into wuri more frequently (M = 0.72,
SD = 0.29) than did I-prime participants (M = 0.50,
SD = 0.39), t(46) = 2.17, p < .05, Cohen’s d = .63. To
investigate a possible context effect, we ran 2 (priming:
collectivism vs. individualism) × 3 (target: family vs.
parent vs. brother) ANOVA with the target as a within-
subject variable. Consistent with Study 1, the Priming ×
Target interaction effect was not significant, F(2, 58) =
.52, p = ns, indicating that the priming effect occurred
regardless of the target word (see Table 2).
Study 2 is important in two aspects. First, it estab-
lishes a causal relation between one’s cultural orientation
and one’s choice of the first-person possessive pronoun
among Koreans. Second, it completely rules out the
alternative, English-competence explanation mentioned
in Study 1, because there is no a priori reason to believe
that thinking about similarities or differences between
self and significant others decreases or increases one’s
English competency.
STUDY 3
Studies 1 and 2 confirmed the proposed relation
between one’s cultural orientation and use of first-person
possessive pronouns among Koreans. However, both
studies used a within-culture design. As we mentioned at
the outset, it was inevitable to use only Koreans because
out of all the languages where the pronoun-priming tech-
nique has been used only the Korean language allows
speakers to freely choose between first-person singular
and plural possessive pronouns. Nonetheless, a growing
body of literature indicates that within-culture (or indi-
vidual) differences might not necessarily correspond to
between-culture (or cross-cultural) differences (Cohen,
2007; Shweder, 1973). Therefore, it seems necessary to
present truly cross-cultural evidence for the relationship
between culture and first-person pronouns.
Because it is impossible to use the methodology we
used in Studies 1 and 2 for a comparison between
Koreans (collectivists) and Americans (individualists),
Study 3 used a different task. Specifically, participants
were asked to guess the meaning of unfamiliar foreign
pronouns. We expected that, faced with unfamiliar for-
eign pronouns, Korean students would be more likely
than American students to guess them as first-person plu-
ral pronouns, indicating that first-person plural pronouns
would be chronically more accessible to Koreans than
to Americans.
Method
Thirty-three American and 38 Korean students were
recruited for the study. We used a task developed by
Davis and Brock (1975), with slight revisions. Participants
were told that earlier research had shown that while
reading a foreign language, people were sometimes able
to guess the correct translation of pronouns. They were
further told that they would be presented with a short
story in Wezwe, a language spoken only in New Guinea.
Participants were then given a short story in Wezwe with
15 pronouns underlined (see the appendix and Stapel &
Tesser, 2001, for more information). Some pronouns
appeared more than twice in the essay. For each pro-
noun, a list of six alternatives (i.e., three first-person
singular pronouns: I, my, me; three first-person plural
pronouns: we, our, us) were provided to participants.
We also administered the Self-Consciousness Scale
(Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975) as a potential covari-
ate because prior research had demonstrated that
enhanced self-awareness was related to the use of first-
person pronouns (Stapel & Tesser, 2001).
In Study 3, we did not measure individualism and col-
lectivism in either Korea or America. Instead, we assumed
that Koreans are collectivistic and Americans are individ-
ualistic based on the previous literature. There has been
a great deal of empirical evidence showing that Koreans
are more collectivistic and less individualistic than
Americans. This was the case not only in the classic study
of Hofstede (1980) but also in recent empirical studies
(H. S. Kim & Markus, 1999; H. S. Kim & Sherman,
2007; Suh, 2002). Most notably, one of the authors
recently recruited participants from the same universities
as in Study 3 in unrelated research and found that Korean
students were indeed more collectivistic and less individu-
alistic than American students (Na & Kitayama, 2009).
Results and Discussion
We calculated the proportion of first-person plural
pronouns being chosen. In our final analysis, we excluded
participants’ choice of first-person possessive pronouns
because, as seen in Studies 1 and 2, the Korean first-
person plural possessive pronoun wuri can be used as
both first-person singular and plural. Therefore, it is
impossible to tell whether a Korean participant meant
singular or plural by wuri.
We expected that plural pronouns are chronically
more available to Koreans than to Americans, and
hence Korean participants would guess unfamiliar for-
eign pronouns as first-person plural more than American
participants would. This was indeed the case. Korean
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Na, Choi / CULTURE AND PRONOUNS 1497
participants chose plural pronouns as the correct trans-
lation of unfamiliar pronouns more than their American
counterparts did (0.45 vs. 0.38), t(69) = 2.65, p < .05,
Cohen’s d = .62.4 We believe that this difference is due
to Koreans having a more collectivistic orientation than
Americans have. Study 3 suggests that first-person plu-
ral pronouns are more readily available to collectivists
than to individualists.
A couple of alternative explanations deserve further
analysis. First, one might argue that Koreans simply
guessed singular and plural pronouns with an equal fre-
quency. In other words, they might have tried to be bal-
anced in their guessing. However, the ratio of choosing
plural pronouns for Korean participants was significantly
different from 0.5, t(37) = 3.14, p < .05. The other alter-
native hypothesis suggests that the Korean–American
difference might have derived from a difference in self-
consciousness. However, the cultural difference was still
significant even after controlling for self-consciousness
scores, F(1, 66) = 5.44, p < .05, η2
p = .076.5
Study 3 extended Studies 1 and 2 in two important
ways. First, Study 3 demonstrated the link between cul-
ture and first-person pronoun use at a between-culture
level. Second, Study 3 provides evidence suggesting that
not only first-person plural possessive pronouns but also
the other forms of first-person plural pronouns are
chronically more salient to those who have a collectivis-
tic orientation than to those who have an individualistic
orientation.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
Our goal was to demonstrate that one’s cultural ori-
entation affects one’s choice of first-person pronouns,
such that collectivists would prefer plural pronouns
whereas individualists would prefer singular pronouns.
To achieve this goal, in Studies 1 and 2 we took advan-
tage of a unique feature of Korean grammar that allows
Korean speakers to use both first-person singular (nae)
and plural (wuri) possessive pronouns as a first-person
singular possessive pronoun. As expected, we found
that collectivistic Koreans preferred to use wuri as a first-
person singular possessive pronoun more than Korean
individualists did. Importantly, such a relationship
between one’s cultural orientation and one’s preference
between wuri and nae among Koreans was not only cor-
relational (Study 1) but also causal (Study 2). Studies 1
and 2 also demonstrated that these results could not be
interpreted as a function of one’s fluency in English.
Although we found a significant difference between the
two priming conditions in Study 2, one might further
wonder which priming condition produced the difference.
To answer this question, a neutral control group was
necessary. Unfortunately, the control group was not
included in Study 2. However, we can get a clue about
this question by comparing the means of the two prim-
ing conditions in Study 2 with the means of Study 1. One
of the most common control groups in the priming lit-
erature is a no-prime control group where participants
perform a task without any priming (Oyserman & Lee,
2008), and our participants in Study 1 were not primed
and performed the same task as those in Study 2. As
seen in Table 3, the difference between the C-prime con-
dition in Study 2 and the control condition (Study 1) was
marginally significant, whereas there was no significant
difference between the I-prime condition in Study 2 and
the control condition. So it appears that collectivism
priming made the difference. Consistent with this, only
collectivism was a significant predictor when collectiv-
ism and individualism were entered as separate predic-
tors into a multiple regression in Study 1. Yet, we are
reluctant to make a strong argument that only collectiv-
ism, not individualism, is associated with first-person
pronoun use, for a couple of reasons.
First, it is still an empirical question whether individu-
alism and collectivism are orthogonal or opposite ends
of the same dimension (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier,
2002; Schimmack, Oishi, & Diener, 2005). Second,
recent meta analysis showed that I-priming and we-
priming techniques are equally effective in producing
individualistic and collectivistic mind-sets, respectively
(Oyserman & Lee, 2008). Hence, future research should
be conducted to provide a clearer answer.
In Study 3, we examined whether the relationship
between cultural orientation and first-person pronoun
use would exist at the between-culture level. When
faced with unfamiliar foreign pronouns, Koreans were
TABLE 3: Comparison Between Study 1 and Study 2 in Proportion of Wuri (PW)
PW for Family PW for Parent PW for Brother PW Overall
n M SD n M SD n M SD n M SD
Individualism prime 25 .57a .40 25 .48a .47 20 .22ab .43 25 .50a .40
Overall mean of Study 1 58 .49a .36 49 .34a .34 38 .32ab .44 58 .43a .34
Collectivism prime 23 .74b .31 23 .78b .33 22 .56b .48 23 .72b .29
NOTE: One-way ANOVA showed significant differences across conditions (all ps < .05, except brother p = .077). Different subscripts indicate
groups that (marginally) significantly differ from each other within each column (a and b: p < .05; ab and b: p < .10).
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1498 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN
more likely than Americans to guess that the foreign
pronouns would be first-person plural pronouns, indi-
cating that first-person plural pronouns are chronically
more salient to collectivists than to individualists.
The most significant contribution of the present
research is that it establishes a truly bidirectional rela-
tionship between cultural orientation and first-person
pronouns. As we discussed at the outset, previous studies
examined only whether exposure to first-person singular
versus plural pronouns would activate an individualistic
or a collectivistic orientation. However, the present
research confirms the existence of the relationship in the
opposite direction, by demonstrating that an individual-
istic or a collectivistic orientation, either chronic or
primed, affects one’s use of first-person pronouns.
A demonstration of the bidirectional relationship
between cultural orientation and first-person pronoun is
particularly important in that it provides a justification
for why pronoun priming should be effective. The tem-
porary activation of individualism and collectivism by
first-person singular and plural pronouns is now well
established. But why should priming work? Unless there
is a link from cultural orientation to first-person pro-
noun use, the pronoun-priming technique is not easily
explainable. For example, previous studies showed that
first-person pronouns (i.e., I vs. we) could induce focused
or diffused attention (Hannover & Kühnen, 2005;
Kühnen et al., 2001). These priming effects might be
attributed to the direct association between first-person
pronouns and attention systems. Alternatively, the find-
ings could suggest that first-person pronouns cause acti-
vation of either individualistic or collectivistic self, and
the induced self, in turn, primes the corresponding atten-
tion system. Although we favor the latter possibility, it
would not be easy to prove the active involvement of the
self in the entire process without a true bidirectional
relationship between first-person pronouns and self.6
Furthermore, the present research demonstrates again
that pronoun use reveals important characteristics of cul-
ture. Kashima and Kashima (1998) discovered that the ease
of dropping pronouns in a language is an important indica-
tor of individualism and collectivism. They found that it
was easier and more frequent to drop a pronoun in the
languages of collectivistic cultures than in the languages of
individualistic cultures. Highlighting pronouns, especially
subjective ones (e.g., “I think . . . ” “You did . . . ”), empha-
sizes one’s individuality and hence threatens interpersonal
relationships in collectivistic cultures. Therefore, Kashima
and Kashima argued that people in collectivistic cultures
often drop pronouns in conversation to reduce tension and
maintain interpersonal harmony. They also found that the
languages in collectivistic cultures had a greater number of
pronouns than those of individualistic cultures. For
example, in English, you is used regardless of status and age
differences between the speaker and the listener. However,
in Korean, there are many types of you, and people must
use a contextually appropriate one, taking into account the
status and age of the speaker and the listener. The same is
true for Japanese. Because relationship and hierarchy are
very important in collectivistic cultures, it is necessary for
their languages to have a large repertoire of pronouns.
Finally, we would like to close this article by pointing
out that the individual-difference approach within a cul-
ture that we took in Study 1 is sometimes very helpful in
exploring the interplay between culture and mind, espe-
cially when a certain phenomenon exists only in a cer-
tain culture. For example, the U.S. southern culture of
honor can be most effectively studied in the United
States by comparing subregions (Cohen, Nisbett, Bowdle,
& Schwarz, 1996). By the same token, the frontier spirit
of the Japanese can be effectively investigated by com-
paring different groups of Japanese (Kitayama, Ishii,
Imada, Takemura, & Ramaswamy, 2006). Out of all the
languages in which pronoun priming proved successful,
only Korean allows one to freely use first-person singu-
lar and first-person plural possessive pronouns inter-
changeably. Therefore, an investigation into whether the
relationship between cultural self-views and pronouns is
truly bidirectional can be carried out most effectively by
looking at individual differences among Koreans. In this
respect, the individual-difference approach should not be
underappreciated in cross-cultural research.
APPENDIX
Todo de poi dele ban (1) numa te cloi san dem toi sel nel-
domo dan ko (2) cas im todo de oidemo dan. Beme de lo ban
(3) seldemo ko jano cas. Te dem (4) de perdoiba ko (5) berba-
noi. Te demi (6) sel cas doimo pan iri toi poban hili numoi son
ban (7) perdoiba. Todo bois de bani (8) demai. Joi num jenoio
bano (9) no jala membarjar koi (10) cas lano. Te sel demo
pojan membaj er bano (11) don todo perdoiban. Oi, de deme
hilie semoi bani (12) te dola inaidemo. De dolo hili (13) nel-
demoi membajar son! Soi tui. Ban (14) canto deme jan biri
biri, deloi poba hin po koi (15) noi eme.
NOTE: Adapted from Stapel and Tesser (2001).
NOTES
1. We excluded a total of four items from the original version
because of their irrelevance to Korean culture.
2. There were three options for participants to translate my to
Korean: wuri versus nae versus omission. Because the number of omit-
ted instances of my is contingent on the number of translated ones, the
omitted cases were not analyzed. In fact, the number of omissions was
not correlated with the INDCOL scores, r = .07, p > .59.
3. Although individualism and collectivism were traditionally seen
as opposite ends of a single dimension (Schimmack, Oishi, & Diener,
2005), empirical studies often found independence between them (see
Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002, for a review). We ran a
series of multiple regressions with individualism and collectivism as
separate predictors for each target word. As expected, the results
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Na, Choi / CULTURE AND PRONOUNS 1499
showed that individualism was negatively associated with proportion
of wuri (PW), whereas collectivism was positively associated with PW.
However, only collectivism reached statistically significant level, stan-
dardized βs = .422, p < .001 and –.119, p = ns, collectivism and
individualism, respectively.
4. As we were concerned, the difference became nonsignificant if
we included wuri in the analysis.
5. The Self-Consciousness Scale consists of three subscales, each
of which measures private, public self-consciousness, and social
anxiety. Public and private self-consciousness but not social anxiety
were higher in Korea than in the United States, Public: MKOR = 22.18,
SD = 4.37 vs. MUS = 19.18, SD = 4.83, t(69) = 3.04, p < .01, prep = .98,
Cohen’s d = .72; Private: MKOR = 30.34, SD = 4.78 vs. MUS = 26.06,
SD = .4.37, t(69) = 3.92, p < .01, prep > .99, d = .93; Social Anxiety:
MKOR = 12.97, SD = 4.09 vs. MUS = 12.64, SD = 5.21, t(69) = .30, p =
ns. All three components were entered into the ANCOVA analysis as
covariates.
6. This last point was raised by David Trafimow.
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Received May 8, 2008
Revision accepted April 29, 2009
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